The Unmanageables

When a crusading but conflict-averse billionaire bankrolls several of journalism’s most prominent mavericks to create a hard-nosed investigative news organization, it’s a recipe for turmoil. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s differences with First Look Media staff have been all over the press. Two top hires are out the door. Sarah Ellison asks whether First Look Media can make headlines that aren’t about itself.

“Sanity Returned”

Pierre Omidyar’s office in Honolulu occupies the second floor of a low-slung and unassuming commercial building, across from a park and a school. Down the street is a row of simple restaurants, and when Omidyar is in town, the billionaire founder of eBay often walks from his office to his favorite lunch spot, a place that he prefers not to have named, partly because he loves it and partly for reasons of security.

One morning in June 2013, just days after the first stories based on Edward Snowden’s classified-document trove started appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, Omidyar received a call there from the Washington Post Company’s chairman and C.E.O., Don Graham, who wanted to talk to him about buying the newspaper. The two had recently exchanged messages about the Post but had never before spoken directly. Omidyar was intrigued by Graham’s passionate pitch for the kind of public-service journalism the Post produces. The two men continued to correspond over the summer. During those months, Omidyar read the autobiography of Graham’s mother, Katharine Graham, who had been the publisher of the Post when the newspaper ran its stories on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. As a memoir reader, he was all business: “I tried to skim through some of the personal stories, just focus on the newspaper ones,” Omidyar told me when I visited him in Hawaii last fall. “I got excited about it.”

But it was not to be. In the end, Graham named a price that Omidyar thought too high. There was a larger issue, too. Omidyar is admittedly conflict-averse, and when considering the Post, “I just remembered instances in my history where when people aren’t fully aligned, when they haven’t bought into the vision, it’s really difficult and it’s actually a little bit draining. It’s not something I look forward to dealing with in the morning. I thought about myself actually in the role of leading a cultural transformation—that would mean dealing with talented people who fundamentally disagreed with me in some cases.” When he imagined that scenario, he realized that he wanted to avoid it. “I said, O.K., fine, that’s maybe not a great idea.” He indulged a small laugh. “Ultimately I think sanity returned.”

Don Graham ended up selling the Post and some affiliated publications to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million. But the discussions with Graham had solidified Omidyar’s resolve to dive deeper into the world of journalism. Soon afterward, Omidyar pledged to start his own news organization and match Bezos’s investment in the Post. He enlisted two of the journalists who had reported on the Snowden documents: Glenn Greenwald, an aggressive and sometimes strident columnist and former lawyer, who had been writing a column for *The Guardian’*s U.S. edition, and Laura Poitras, an Academy Award-nominated documentary-film maker, who had been the first journalist to take Snowden seriously, and who did the most to bring his revelations to light. They were joined by Jeremy Scahill, another Academy Award-nominated documentary-film maker and a writer for The Nation, who had also cultivated an aggressive persona and strong relationships with national-security whistle-blowers. Omidyar announced that the new endeavor would have a “core mission around supporting and empowering independent journalists across many sectors and beats.”

As Omidyar has by now discovered, starting an organization from scratch was hardly a safeguard against dealing with people who fundamentally disagreed with him. First Look Media, as Omidyar’s enterprise has come to be called, is beset by staff turmoil and dissatisfaction. One of its most high-profile journalists, former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, left in October after clashing with Omidyar and his deputies, amid allegations of insubordination and possibly gender-based hostility on Taibbi’s part. John Cook, editor in chief of what is so far First Look’s only publication, The Intercept, is leaving the site at the end of 2014 to return to his former employer, the gossip-and-news site Gawker. These departures have laid bare how Omidyar’s process-driven approach to management clashed with the ways of the independent-minded journalists he hired. In many respects, the current turmoil was entirely predictable. “He hired a newsroom of unmanageables,” one veteran newspaper editor told me. More specifically, Omidyar is attempting to create a news organization with the help of individuals who have made their careers eschewing—when not mocking—news organizations of all stripes.

When the news of Taibbi’s departure broke in New York, four of those individuals—Poitras, Greenwald, Scahill, and Cook—wrote a detailed retrospective on the goings-on at First Look, and then dared to publish it on The Intercept. The article located the dispute with Taibbi within a larger one: the journalists who joined First Look thought they were getting something “free-wheeling” but instead had been met with “a confounding array of rules, structures, and systems imposed by Omidyar and other First Look managers.”

The article was journalistic independence as performance art, an act of self-conscious insubordination to defend a fallen comrade—Taibbi—and salvage the autonomy, or at least the appearance of it, that the entire venture had been founded on. It was also a kind of test for Omidyar. That the four of them weren’t disciplined or fired reveals something fundamental about the strange standoff at the heart of the enterprise.

First Look began in the fall of 2013, amid a flurry of enthusiasm over the Snowden revelations, and amid intense pressure to keep publishing stories based on his vast cache of documents. An early rush to hire staff—less than two dozen all told—was quickly followed by a period of caution and circumspection as Omidyar began to think afresh about how he wanted his new journalism venture to look: the kind of thinking that everyone agrees would have been helpful to work out earlier. The problems at First Look are many, including an essential culture clash between people who appear to have antithetical opinions about everything from management style to subject matter to seating arrangements to whether journalists should have landlines. Disagreements over “process” have been at once petty and paralyzing.

Here’s the basic recipe: Combine two types of strong-willed visionary—one cool and analytical, the other fervent and outspoken. Add a dash of messianic outlook to the ingredients. Heat under pressure. Could the result have turned out any other way?

Looking for a Business

I first met with Omidyar, who is 47, in September, in a small conference room in his Honolulu office. He did not exactly look strong-willed or visionary. He wore a blue polo shirt, jeans, a red woven necklace, and a wooden beaded bracelet. His dark hair, which he once wore in a ponytail, was cut short, a streak of gray above his forehead. He is a fan of Battlestar Galactica and occasionally referees his children’s soccer games. The laid-back effect gives no hint of his drive or his fixity of purpose. Omidyar told me that early on in his professional life he wanted to be removed from Silicon Valley in order to “have space to think” and to get away from the Valley’s increasing focus “on money and wealth.” In 2006 he moved to Hawaii, where both he and his wife, Pam, had spent parts of their childhood. The couple bought a home in the upscale Kahala neighborhood of Honolulu. Omidyar also reportedly owns a 640-acre ranch in Montana, a place that could serve as his solar-powered safe house. He keeps two private jets in Hawaii. This is a man with a worldview and opinions about the future.

Pierre Morad Omidyar was born in Paris in 1967 to well-to-do Iranian immigrants who had gone to France for university. His mother, a linguist, would eventually earn her Ph.D. at the Sorbonne. His father attended medical school. When Omidyar was six years old, the family moved to Washington, D.C., so his father could begin a residency at Johns Hopkins. His parents separated when he was young. According to the book The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, in seventh grade, Omidyar would sneak out of gym class to play around on his science teacher’s Radio Shack TRS-80. He taught himself BASIC programming. The next year, in eighth grade, Omidyar and his mother moved to Hawaii so his mother could pursue fieldwork. He attended the prestigious Punahou School (Barack Obama’s alma mater—Obama had graduated the year before); completed high school at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, in Potomac, Maryland; and went on to college at Tufts, where he met Pam, who was studying biology (she went on to get a master’s in plant molecular genetics from U.C. Santa Cruz). The summer of his junior year, Omidyar got an internship as a Macintosh programmer in Silicon Valley. The internship turned into a job, and he took a semester off from school to keep it. Omidyar finished up college at Berkeley.

After graduation, Omidyar found work for a short time at an Apple subsidiary called Claris. From Claris, he launched a start-up (for pen-based computing, later popularized by Palm), which was eventually bought by Microsoft, making Omidyar a millionaire before he was 30. Omidyar was one of the many programmers of that era looking for a new business idea, and he found it over Labor Day weekend in 1995 when, in the extra bedroom of his town house, he created a clunky auction site that allowed Internet users to buy goods from one another. He called it AuctionWeb—an early iteration of eBay.

Two years earlier Omidyar had met a Stanford business-school graduate, Jeff Skoll, now chairman of Participant Media, who was working at the time for Knight Ridder, attempting to develop the company’s Internet strategy. Skoll was initially skeptical about eBay, but he eventually went to work for Omidyar as eBay’s first employee. Skoll talked to me about how revolutionary (and counter-intuitive) the idea behind eBay—allowing total strangers to exchange goods—seemed in the 1990s. “It was a time when nobody trusted the Internet,” he recalls. Omidyar’s key insight was that “people are generally good and if they have information they’ll act on it.”

eBay went public in 1998, making Omidyar a billionaire. Omidyar is conscious of his rapid rise to wealth: “I created the company in September of 1995.... It was public in September of ’98. I mean, you are talking three years of operation, right? I mean, it’s insane.” He is worth roughly $8 billion today. Omidyar gave up day-to-day responsibilities at eBay in 1999 (though he remains the company’s chairman). He and Pam spent the next 15 years devoted to building a number of philanthropic endeavors that became the Omidyar Group. They have dedicated $1.5 billion to these causes and other public-service ventures.

The Arianna Factor

Omidyar recalls that, even before the Snowden revelations, a series of aggressive moves by the Justice Department had gotten his attention. The federal government, in 2012, had seized phone records of Associated Press reporters in search of the source of an A.P. story. Two years earlier, the Justice Department had named Fox reporter James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” in a leak case. Both episodes became public in the spring of 2013 and alarmed Omidyar.

Then he spent the summer talking to Don Graham, and watching the Snowden revelations unfold. “I think Don Graham sort of ended up getting a ‘two for one’ as far as the industry goes, right?,” Omidyar says now. “Because he did the right thing for the paper, he got some new capital and a committed owner. And he got me thinking seriously about journalism and what I could contribute to that in the context of buying his paper. But then our tracks diverged.”

Omidyar’s track led him to Arianna Huffington, who in early September 2013 had flown to Hawaii to launch Huffington Post Hawaii in partnership with Omidyar’s own Honolulu Civil Beat, an online investigative news organization established in 2010. Civil Beat was created to provide an alternative to what some saw as the relaxed “aloha spirit” of Hawaiian journalism. The co-founder, Randy Ching, is a former eBay executive, and the first editor was John Temple, who had been the editor and publisher of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News and a top editor at The Washington Post. (Both men would figure prominently in First Look Media.) Huffington spent three days in Hawaii with Omidyar, flying together from island to island for a series of events to celebrate the launch. “Nothing was too much,” Huffington remembered. “That’s one of the things I love about him.” During those three days, Omidyar says, he began to see Huffington as “a trusted friend and adviser.” In New York, Huffington organized a dinner at her apartment so that he could meet various media figures. “It ended up being so many people I had to build a new top for the round table,” Huffington told me. The guests included Facebook co-founder and New Republic owner Chris Hughes and his husband, political hopeful Sean Eldridge; ProPublica editor Stephen Engelberg and his wife, author Gabrielle Glaser; advertising executive and social-strategy author John Gerzema; political and corporate adviser Ian Osborne; CBS anchor and interviewer Charlie Rose; and Facebook C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg. Omidyar, Huffington says, wrote copiously in a little black notebook that was “small enough to fit in a woman’s purse.” (Huffington says she has now bought the same kind of notebook to preserve a record of interesting conversations.) At the dinner, Omidyar didn’t divulge his interest in launching his own organization, but the guests talked about the challenges and opportunities in digital media, and Omidyar’s blood continued to warm.

Soon after, Omidyar and Huffington flew to Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama was hosting a five-day Mind & Life Institute gathering of Buddhist monks and scientists. During the trip, the two discussed the difficulty of launching a destination news site. “That train has left the station,” Huffington says she told him, meaning that unlike the Huffington Post, which had launched nine years earlier, when big niches were there for the taking, anything Omidyar did would have to rely more on social-media sharing to build an audience.

In September 2013—after he and Huffington had solidified the Hawaii partnership but before they traveled to India—Omidyar connected on Twitter with Trevor Timm, a young lawyer and co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, who tweets frequently on the media. The two e-mailed and eventually connected over Silent Circle in an encrypted video chat. Omidyar asked Timm, “If I were to create a new news organization, what kind of an organization would I have to create to support the kind of work that people like Glenn do?” “Glenn,” of course, was a reference to Glenn Greenwald. A few weeks later, Timm got back to Omidyar and told him he should get in touch with Greenwald himself, noting that Greenwald and some colleagues were thinking about “some things that might be interesting to you.”

Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill had in fact been talking about joining up to launch a new media outlet of their own. They had started to put together a possible investor list, which was how Timm knew about Greenwald’s plans in the first place. “He was very humble,” Greenwald told me, thinking back to that first conversation with Omidyar. (Again, via video chat. To this day, Omidyar and Greenwald have never met in person.) Omidyar said, according to Greenwald, “I don’t know if this is even possible, and you might laugh at me. But I was wondering if you would be interested in playing some role” in getting a new media organization off the ground. Omidyar told Greenwald that he wanted to use his background as a technologist and his reach in Silicon Valley to develop technology and software to revitalize privacy on the Internet, and to allow people to come to journalists anonymously. Greenwald conferred with Poitras and Scahill, and they all agreed to cast their lot with Omidyar as long as they could continue to publish the Snowden documents—that was a given. Talks about what would become First Look Media now began in earnest.

A Hiring Binge

For Greenwald, relationships with media organizations have always been uneasy. He had gained the attention of Edward Snowden through his fiery columns for the online publication Salon. In his articles and books, Greenwald railed against not just government surveillance but also civil-rights abuses, U.S. foreign policy in general, and, as often as not, the “Establishment” press. His propensity for attacking The New York Times was athletic. No matter what the topic, he could work in a dig about the Times. When he started writing for *The Guardian’*s U.S. online edition, he had worked out a relationship similar to the one he had had at Salon: his columns were unedited, except to address serious legal or journalistic questions.

At the time of Omidyar’s approach, Greenwald and Laura Poitras had spent much of the previous four months in constant contact over the Snowden stories. Poitras, though perhaps more skeptical of the mainstream media than Greenwald, had worked to publish articles with Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and The New York Times but remained independent and sometimes frustrated with the strictures imposed by big media organizations. Jeremy Scahill, for his part, had dropped out of college, worked in homeless shelters, and was introduced to journalism as a volunteer for the nonprofit news program Democracy Now! In 2007 he published a book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which won a George Polk Book Award. He came out with a second book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, in 2013, and produced and narrated a film by the same name. The film, which focused on U.S. covert actions and drone strikes, was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2014.

Greenwald said to Omidyar that, if he and his two colleagues were to join the new venture, “we were going to need to launch in six weeks,” Greenwald told me. The reason for urgency was to be able to continue publishing Snowden material without missing a beat. “He freaked out and said, ‘That’s a very fast time frame.’ ” But Omidyar agreed to push ahead, and Greenwald went on a hiring binge. Given how rapidly the organization had come into existence, and how meager the planning, people signed up without any real idea of what the site was going to be. Greenwald’s first hires were Dan Froomkin, the Washington-bureau chief of the Huffington Post, and Liliana Segura, of The Nation. Soon after came Eric Bates, from Rolling Stone, who had edited the financial writer Matt Taibbi and also the magazine’s award-winning Michael Hastings story on General Stanley McChrystal. Bates, Omidyar told me, “was somebody Glenn could work with, which is important, I think. The editor-reporter relationship is critical.”

Greenwald and his colleagues didn’t get every prospective hire they wanted. “They came after everybody,” said someone who was recruited. “When this thing came out, pick your investigative reporter and I think they approached them.” Among those recruited was Matt Apuzzo, then at the Associated Press, who had shared a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the New York Police Department’s surveillance of Muslim communities. First Look also approached two of Apuzzo’s A.P. colleagues, who had won the Pulitzer with him: Adam Goldman, who would soon accept a job at The Washington Post, and Eileen Sullivan. First Look told potential recruits that it was building a site that would have Huffington Post-level traffic but with the smartest investigative reporters in the business. It seemed the organization wanted to recruit a group of big-name journalists and have them join First Look together. But Apuzzo balked at the numbers the First Look recruiter initially suggested for a salary—it didn’t seem to take into account the risk of joining a new journalism start-up. In December, it was announced that Apuzzo was going to work for The New York Times. Omidyar also unsuccessfully pursued James Risen, the Times reporter who, back in 2006, shared a Pulitzer Prize for an early and crucial series on the Bush administration’s warrantless-wiretapping program.

The earliest public word of the existence of First Look came in the form of a BuzzFeed story on October 15, 2013, revealing that Greenwald planned to leave The Guardian to help launch a new media outlet. Looking back, Omidyar told me that the timing was unfortunate because “it was leaked before we knew what the heck we were doing.

“The initial priority for us, for Glenn, was dominated by how can we create the operational and legal infrastructure necessary to responsibly report on those documents as quickly as possible,” Omidyar told me. “That was really the operational focus of the first few months of the organization.” He ultimately agreed to fund the appeal of Greenwald’s spouse, David Miranda, who had been detained over the summer by British authorities while transporting Snowden-related material. Omidyar created a litigation fund to support press-freedom cases, with Miranda as its first one. In December, Omidyar began thinking about the “first incarnation” of First Look, beyond Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill, and beyond the Snowden documents. “Our best idea at the time was: We’ll create digital homes that we call digital magazines for this collection of journalists around different topics.” The early topics, in Omidyar’s mind, were national security, the economy and finance, and then, potentially, sports and entertainment.

And the hiring continued. Within a few months First Look had hired Lynn Oberlander, formerly the general counsel of The New Yorker, as its legal counsel. Micah Lee, formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who had helped Greenwald with his encrypted communications with Snowden, was hired to set up online security, and worked from home in Berkeley. Omidyar had also approved Greenwald’s suggested hiring of *Rolling Stone’*s Matt Taibbi, who had once famously referred to Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Taibbi was to start a site focused on financial and political corruption—which eventually adopted a satirical tone—that came to be called Racket. Omidyar also approved the hiring of Gawker’s John Cook, to be editor in chief of The Intercept, the one First Look site actually up and running. The Intercept was dedicated to national-security reporting and in its early days focused almost exclusively on the Snowden documents.

Who’s in Charge?

In January 2014, Omidyar asked John Temple, who was at the time doing a fellowship at Stanford, to join First Look’s board. “I say, ‘John, I need your help. We are trying to build an organization here, a journalistic institution, one that’s going to have a large-scale impact over a long period of time,’ ” Omidyar told me. During their two years together at Civil Beat, they got along well, despite their different approaches. “Pierre likes systems and process,” Temple told me. “I’m intuitive.” Omidyar had been informally talking to Temple about his new venture since August, but it was only in January that Omidyar asked Temple to officially come on board.

“I viewed the responsibility he had acquired as twofold,” Temple, who lives in San Francisco, told me in August, when he was in New York to visit First Look’s office there. He said to Omidyar, “Glenn is on the biggest story of his life, and you can’t go dark. By necessity you need to create a platform so Glenn can publish.” At the same time, “you have to be sure it doesn’t dictate the future of the company.” Temple argued that the security requirements and “workflow” of the Snowden documents couldn’t be that of the entire organization. He set out to help Omidyar determine that “first incarnation” of First Look, beyond the Snowden documents. One of his initial tasks was to organize an event in Laguna Beach, at the Montage hotel, for Omidyar and—according to Stephen Buckley, then dean of faculty at the media-focused Poynter Institute, who attended the meeting—about a dozen editors, journalism educators, industry analysts, and former reporters, to hear Omidyar’s vision for First Look, and to challenge him on it.

Around the time Omidyar was meeting in Laguna Beach, the physical reality of First Look was sitting in temporary office space in Manhattan. There were perhaps a dozen reporters in New York, all working under the supervision of executive editor Bates, as well as under Cook and Taibbi. The task at that point was to prepare to launch a number of digital magazines that would feed into Firstlook.org. Taibbi’s site, Racket, was still officially unnamed, though Taibbi had hired Alex Pareene, from Salon, to be his executive editor. Meanwhile, Temple explained to me, all of The Intercept’s founding editors—Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill—were busy on their own projects. “Laura is in Berlin making a movie. Glenn is writing a best-seller. Jeremy is at the Academy Awards,” he said. “It’s all stratospheric.” The Intercept’s first story, published in February, was a joint venture between Greenwald and Scahill on the N.S.A.’s role in the government’s drone program. Initially, the site published articles periodically, but the announcements of new hires seemed more frequent than the stories. The Silicon Valley site PandoDaily posted an item in April, “Glenn, Intercepted,” noting that no new stories had been posted on The Intercept in nearly 10 days.

Even so, First Look kept growing. But it was hard to say who was running the show. John Temple was still finishing up his journalism fellowship at Stanford. Randy Ching, First Look’s C.O.O., was in California. And Omidyar was rarely seen in New York, though he and Temple met occasionally in the Bay Area. And if no one was running the show, it’s also true that no one even knew what the show was.

“Up Your Asana”

Expansion without direction—it couldn’t last. In April, Eric Bates told Cook and Taibbi that Omidyar had put in place a three-month hiring freeze. If there was a specific need related to the Snowden archive, Bates said, then the hire could go through, but otherwise Omidyar wanted to buy some time to reflect. When Greenwald and Poitras came to New York to accept a Polk Award for the Snowden stories that had appeared in The Guardian, Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill arranged a video chat with Omidyar about the purported freeze. Omidyar said that there was no freeze and that there had been a misunderstanding. Still, John Cook and Matt Taibbi found it difficult to get hires approved for The Intercept and Racket. In June, Greenwald, Poitras, Scahill, and Taibbi wrote a private letter to Omidyar expressing their displeasure. They complained about arbitrary restrictions on hiring and a lack of clear budgets for the two sites. The letter, after back-and-forth discussions between First Look journalists and management, resulted in a clear budget for The Intercept and increased autonomy. During this time, The Intercept was publishing significant national-security stories, not all of them based on Snowden’s documents. Over the course of a month—from early July to early August—The New York Times followed three such stories from The Intercept, and credited the site with breaking the news.

In late July, Omidyar announced in a blog post that, instead of launching a variety of sites, First Look would be “building out” The Intercept and Racket. No other sites were immediately planned, and First Look would focus on experimenting with the technical aspects of distributing First Look’s journalism, rather than simply creating new content. For some of the journalists who had joined the site expecting to be part of a large, reporter-driven, and all-purpose media organization, the news came as a shock. Omidyar’s technical curiosity about the distribution of news was trumping his interest in actual news, some of the journalists said. That impression was partly seeded by John Temple, who had become First Look’s president in June. Shortly after he arrived, Temple spoke to the First Look newsroom about his recent stint at Stanford and an inspiring start-up he had encountered that created content for Oculus Rift 3-D gaming headsets to put people into video virtual-reality settings.

Adding to Cook and Taibbi’s overall frustration was a suggestion from First Look executives that journalists make use of specific computer programs and project-management software. The editors were encouraged to use a task-management system called Asana. It works like this: a person creates a task on Asana and invites relevant colleagues to join the task. The task has a deadline, and everyone invited can see the chains of conversation about the task. When the task is completed, a box is checked, and the task goes into an archive. Jeremy Scahill jokingly called the program “up your Asana.” Matt Taibbi used the program so infrequently he had to be continually reminded of how it functioned.

First Look managers also encouraged the use of RASCIs—responsibility assignment matrices—to manage various projects, whether it was site design or promotional spots. The acronym stands for the five different categories of people on a given project: Responsible, Accountable, Supportive, Consulted, and Informed. Although many of the journalists were not expected to use RASCIs very frequently, editors occasionally had to. In an organization that First Look editors had billed as non-hierarchical, the use of responsibility assignment matrices rubbed some people the wrong way.

By then, the First Look temporary offices had moved to a building in the Flatiron District, near Madison Square Park, in a space once occupied by Creative Artists Agency. Closed-door offices ringed the perimeter, and the center of the newsroom was filled with high-walled cubicles. Over the summer, there were discussions about redesigning the office so it would have an open plan. Cook and Taibbi argued that certain journalists, such as those dealing with Snowden documents, would need to be in a closed office with doors that locked. What resulted was a compromise. Some journalists kept offices, but the rest were in the open newsroom. Some of the extra offices were converted to become “Zen” or “collaboration” rooms. A “seat changing” party was also suggested, in which editors and reporters would throw their names into a hat and draw a new working space. (This party never took place.) A disagreement surfaced over whether the First Look journalists in New York should have landlines. Cook and Taibbi wanted them, but First Look suggested the staff just use their cell phones, and the company offered to buy phones for anyone who needed or wanted one. As a compromise, the company installed phone lines in “quiet” rooms where journalists could conduct interviews if needed.

As Taibbi’s relationship with First Look’s management was deteriorating, so was his working relationship with a female employee. When the employee, who does not wish to be named, complained about Taibbi’s behavior, Temple and Ching called a videoconference with Taibbi, and Temple launched an investigation.

What followed was a set of events that resulted in Taibbi’s leaving the company, in late October. On October 30, First Look’s founding journalists—Greenwald, Scahill, and Poitras, joined by Intercept editor in chief Cook—wrote an article, published in The Intercept, outlining the reasons for Taibbi’s exit. “The Inside Story of Matt Taibbi’s Departure from First Look Media” described Taibbi’s leaving as “the culmination of months of contentious disputes with First Look founder Pierre Omidyar, chief operating officer Randy Ching, and president John Temple over the structure and management of Racket,” the site Taibbi had been hired to create. “Those disputes were exacerbated by a recent complaint from a Racket employee about Taibbi’s behavior as a manager,” the article maintained. Specifically, a female Racket staffer had “complained to senior management that Taibbi had been verbally abusive and unprofessionally hostile, and that she felt the conduct may have been motivated, at least in part, by her gender.” The article also described the “confusion, differing perspectives, and misaligned expectations” between First Look management and the editorial staff. It alleged that Omidyar personally signed off on routine expenses such as taxi rides and office supplies.

In preparing their article, the authors looked into the complaints against Taibbi. Insiders say they debated for days about what to include in their story. An initial version didn’t mention the gender of the employee who had raised concerns about Taibbi. The authors circulated early drafts of the story among some Intercept staffers and, based on the feedback they received, particularly from women, determined that they might be seen as protecting a male journalistic star and ignoring the concerns of a female staffer. The final story was not reviewed by First Look’s internal counsel before publication.

On October 10, according to the Intercept account, Taibbi left the office claiming he had been stripped of managerial responsibilities (a claim First Look managers dispute). Taibbi maintained that the woman’s complaint was without merit. First Look, according to the article, determined that Taibbi was not legally liable for his behavior, just a bad manager. Then Omidyar told him he could not return to the organization as an employee, only as a contractor who would not be managing other employees. This was not acceptable, and he left the company and published an article soon after in Rolling Stone. First Look declined to comment on the complaints referenced in the Intercept piece, or to say whether it has routine procedures in place to handle complaints of this kind. The company also declined to comment on its own investigation, to say if it is complete, or to indicate whether the person who lodged the complaint against Taibbi is satisfied with the process.

After Taibbi left, First Look held an all-company meeting during which various employees voiced their displeasure that First Look’s management had allowed him to leave. The woman whose complaint had triggered Temple’s investigation stood up and said that the reaction she was hearing negated her experience. Another woman stood up and said that the whole episode made her concerned as a woman working in the company. The day the Intercept story ran, Nick Denton had breakfast with John Cook and offered him a job back at his old employer, Gawker, which he ultimately accepted.

I asked Omidyar what he thought of the Intercept article, and he said, speaking carefully, “I need to be in a position where I’m supporting the work of our journalists and I have their backs, especially on high-stakes stuff. And I have no doubts about that.” The national-security reporting, he added, “is the stuff that really matters. It’s their publication—they can publish what they want.... So I’m not going to second-guess their decisions.”

As for what lies ahead, the Intercept article noted that, after “months of disagreements and negotiations,” the Intercept editors had reached an understanding with First Look executives and had been given a sizable budget and autonomy to make decisions. The future of Racket, with Taibbi gone, remained unclear. [Shortly after the print version of this article went to press First Look Media announced that Racket would be shut down.]

“I’m Patient”

I met with Omidyar for a second time at the offices of one of his philanthropic organizations, Omidyar Network, in Redwood City, California. Asked about First Look’s rocky start, he replied pointedly, saying that “building something from scratch is difficult.” He noted that he had done it before. “Lots of people have done it before—but, actually, many more have never done it.” He chalked up some of the difficulty at First Look to employees not understanding the normal chaos of building an organization. “Part of being an entrepreneur is taking on a large challenge—having a vision to take on a challenge—and then putting the pieces in place to get there. And a lot of those pieces are not related to the challenge that you’re trying to address. They’re the infrastructure of a company.” He added that the normal difficulties of a start-up are exacerbated by building an organization “that has, at its core, a group of journalists who are doing the most high-stakes, difficult work that there is.” He noted that building the organization was a challenge, but “a year in, actually, we’re in really great shape.” His overall outlook was one he had expressed to me before, when we spoke in Hawaii: “I’m patient.”

Silicon Valley executives like to talk about how you aren’t succeeding if you aren’t failing at least some of the time. By that measure, First Look’s first year is a towering success. Perhaps the tensions and battles between the journalists at First Look and their executive counterparts can be interpreted as the typical growing pains of a start-up, with Omidyar cast as the plucky entrepreneur at its helm, tinkering, adjusting, and perfecting his model. But it’s more likely that the misunderstandings at First Look derive from a fundamental philosophical divide between two groups. The journalists saw themselves as freethinking, independent, and adversarial, and felt hemmed in by a process-driven management structure. For its part, management thought it was simply providing some much-needed organization—a system—within which the journalists could operate. The hubris that each party brought to First Look probably meant that self-awareness was not at the top of the list of personal attributes.

First Look now faces, at the very least, a difficult recruiting environment. The Snowden material will hold Greenwald and Omidyar together for the foreseeable future. But First Look’s reliance on high-maintenance personalities made the turmoil it has experienced almost inevitable. Omidyar has learned quite a bit in the past year, and the lessons he takes away will shape whatever it is he’s now left with. One of them may be that cultural transformations aren’t easy, even when you’re creating the organization yourself. And you have to wonder what Omidyar thinks now, as sanity returns, about that offer from the Post.

Correction: The original version of this article states that the federal government, in 2012, had wiretapped Associated Press reporters; in fact, the government had seized phone records of Associated Press reporters. We regret the error.